Firstly this board I believe has no impact on confidence at Headingley and if it has then they are in the wrong business.

And secondly the only time you've been behind Hardaker, Hall and Watkins is with your boot up their arris as they walk through the exit door.

.... His stubbornness and spitefulness e.g. Baldwinson non selection does him no favours when the going is tough and you need a few friends. As the saying goes "what goes around comes around"..

More pertinently I believe " make friends on the way up because you never know who you might meet/need on the way down".

Really? Would you like me to dig up your posts on Hardaker - or, indeed in this very post, where you state:


So it's only a problem if the blame is aimed at BMD?



I know this is aimed at Sal, but as far as I am concerned I do not question his work ethic & that he is frantically trying to solve our current problems. I do, however, question whether he is the man who can put things right - things have got progressively worse, not better.

I also believe that if we signed Cameron Smith (Aus version), Jonathan Thurston & Matt Scott & got our injured players back that it wouldn't be long before BMD looked like the second coming. Coaches, IMO, show their true worth in adversity.



I am a season ticket holder & attend all home & the occasional away match. I do not believe in booing as it is counterproductive. I do my (very small) part in trying to support & lift the team. Do you? Plus what tvoc said

Selective as usual. You may consider yourself good at filling in spreadsheets but you leave much to be desired in your simplistic analysis.

Most coaches would have had the same huge problem to overcome the most persistent and unusual injury crisis that Leeds have had to face this season. If you remove the main half or your key asset it is going to have a serious affect on your performances. Pray tell what are your "ingenious plans to cover" this?

Because I disagree with your opinion regarding BM does not ipso facto mean I therefore think he can walk on water. It is precisely this sort of flawed logic that you are applying to the coach and why I argue against you.

Careful bringing sensible reasoned argument into this forum. Especially the 'injury excuse' that Mac should have magically accounted for.

Still backing Stuart Lancaster for the England RU job?

Often there is no need to look for complicated answers, sometimes it's quite straight forward even if some prefer to dance around the issue.

I'm sure McDermott had a hand in the Leeds success over the previous five seasons as one part of the senior trio which included Sinfield and Peacock. On his own it's turned to dust even quicker than his biggest critics could have anticipated.

Completely agree but i will add when you read comments this season or previous ones you wont find ANY that blame the Coach for EVERYTHING that went or has gone wrong.
Indeed alot of comments where posters dare to ?? The Coach were valid at that moment in time in terms of performances/selections & results.
I dont mind admitting after calling for his sacking a few years ago he & the team proved us wrong & that was great to see.
Of course JC et al will have you believe picking injured players ,using only 15/16 men or selecting his favourites when in a sustained run of poor form is top class Coaching acumen & anybody who questions it has poor judgement because we got it wrong wanting him sacked in previous years.
The fact remains as we stand we are bottom of SL playing the worst RL ive seen in the last 15/20yrs.
Now its a given injuries & pre-season disruptions play a part in that as does questionable recruitment but to sit back & absolve this Coach of any blame imo is wrong & also shows we've gone as far as we can under him.
The 17 available are capable & should be better than they've produced simple as that they still concede the same type of tries they still look clueless in attack & the Coach has failed to address it.
Hopefully GH will cut out the BS & the on/off field clear out will begin so we can hit 2017 running.
Yes players are culpable as is GH but so is the Coach & ATEOTD the buck stops with him other teams have suffered this year & indeed had 1 or 2 hammerings but they've recovered to perform even missing key players we look nowhere near & mssrs Smith & Mclennon left/were let go with much better final seasons on their CV's.

Yes they would - the point is that BMD hasn't made a very good fist of it.

As far as ingenious plans, perhaps I as being a bit tongue in cheek (hence the quotation marks). But BMD is a highly paid professional coach who is tasked with getting the most out of the resources available to him. I quite simply feel that he has not been able to do this. He has been found wanting.

Given the line-ups vs Widnes (A), Salford (A), Wakefield (H), HKR (H) & Castleford (H), before the debacle of this season, would people rather have had the opposition's team or Leeds' to coach? (I might also add Catalans (H) - with 7 of their players unavailable - ooh ooh we had 8/9/10* *delete as applicable). I think most sane-minded know the answer.

Maybe so



Maybe this isn't true either

Personally it's the placing the credit onto Sinfield and Peacock for past success that I find disrespectful and it's only something people jumped on when McDermott himself revealed they did SOME coaching in training and his detractors turned this into they did it ALL.

Also people bringing up his London record to kick him whilst ignoring how badly that club was run as the years passed by and just about any coach would've struggle with that gig under the ownership/management there.

I never said Sinny/JP did it all plus it wasn't just jumped on either its a pretty rellevant point to make given A where we are & B.The obvious influence both had.
As for London again i never mentioned it but i will say that the owner backed him with a reasonable SC spend as long as he could.

It wasn't said as a personal claim against you, just what has been said in general.

Doesn't really matter if you get sixty thousand every week if you sit rock bottom of the league.

I have a lot of time for Lancaster (we tried to get him as a player coach 18 years back) but he played an important role in reviving England's fortunes and bringing on younger players and the current squad are effectively Lancaster's choices. Quite why the players under performed so badly in the World Cup is still not clear but another example of players failing their coach. That said I was never in favour of Lancaster's pre determined substitution policy which played a part in the key defeat by Wales. But as a RU expert you will know that.



Too true. Nothing complicated about it at all - we have had half our squad (the better half) sitting in the stand injured each week. QED



How generous of you to afford Mac some crumbs from your table. I see you are trying to spin this theory that Mac was one of three coaches. I do not remember you blaming and calling for the head of these so called co-coaches (Sinfield & JP) in the years since 2011. Can you send me the link for your "taxi for Sinfield and JP" coaching comments

I added the quotation marks they were not in your original posting

Coming up next week, in another explosive episode of 'Leeds Rhinos - The season gone rottten' you will NOT BELIEVE what Mcdermott says to one of his players after another lackluster training session. Club Dictator Gary Hetherington attempts to bring in some fresh legs, but get's more than he bargained for. Will one single, disastrous decision mean the end? And finally the truth behind the infamous ''pie incident'' exposed. With exclusive never before seen interviews.

All on next week in another hard hitting episode you DO NOT want to miss.

That sounds so much like an Ant & Dec comment

Negative thought is a menace and should be kept well away from creative people everywhere. I do hope the players don't read the terrible stuff posted on theses forums but I suspect some of them do. Some of the comments on here have been calling for chants of sack the coach etc and booing and if this sort of negative thinking is taken onto the terraces then there could well be a negative impact




I have consistently been fully behind our side in previous times of adversity and have posted positive comment specifically on all three players you name. But unlike some of the more sycophantic hero worship of certain players displayed on this forum I have had on occasion good reason to balance the rhetoric by pointing out a few basic flaws in each players game which have been proven to be correct observations. Which of my comments do you disagree with on each player?

I don't have an issue with McDermott staying provided his role at the club is changed and a serious assistant/s are appointed who can challenge his dogma.

Experienced players are making errors because the game plan of the coach isn't working so they are forcing the game. The defence isn't working again because the structures implemented by the coach don't work. Having a centre defending next to a prop is madness and you will not find another centre defending as far in field as Watkins at any of the top teams in SL.

I am not suggesting McDermott isn't working on the training field - what I am suggesting is whatever he is coaching isn't working - even you have to admit, least points scored, most points conceded and bottom of the league is tangible evidence something isn't working.

I take your point about things outside of his control but I ask you again - given all the stuff out of his control do you think the current position is as good as McDermott could have achieved?

We pay good money to watch the team we expect a level of performance that reflects the make up of the team - not winning but a performance. You expect all fans to cheer the team off and not criticise when they have got beat by 50 points - are you for real?

Under Murray Sinfield played 24 times so I would suggest your Murray didn't pick Sinfield is inaccurate - so we can discount the rest of the paragraph as nonsense.

Baldwinson made his debut in 2013 so if he was good enough then why isn't he good enough now? Has he regressed so far in the Leeds system?

A measured and fair assessment Sal IMO.....but you must know by now Juan (sorry for not asking Mr.Cornetto) will never concede an inch. We all know there will be a lengthy and tedious point by point rebuttal. Bring it on Juan

zzzzzzz. At least Printer only sometimes likes to play devil's advocate

....Juan is just the permanent full time devil's sophist

So have I - my eyes tell me that the team is not being coached well (structures, motivation, tactics, use of subs)



I am



You are more than entitled to your opinion. I happen to disagree with it. You obviously have a problem with Hardaker, but he was the best player in SL last year (voted by his peers). The following have been in equally poor form to that of Hardaker: Cuthbertson, Singleton, Ablett, Garbutt (early season - last 2 or 3 games good form), Hall, Sutcliffe, McGuire and Watkins. We don't appear to see the same vehemence of negative opinion about any of those established players.



Proven in what way?



Your consistent fallback argument. And yet, I have been consistent in pressing you to explain why it is that we appear to have no: 6th tackle options near the opponents' line
Structures in defense (at least no improvement on those structures) - no evidence that they have been instructed how best to line up in defense to try & plug the same gaps that appear week after week
Structures in attack (few lines of runners off the ball carrier creating hesitancy & doubt in the opposition line)
Poor use of substitutes (although this is less a priority this year from previous)
In short, not one crumb of evidence that problems have been worked on & sorted so that they become a non-problem.

Of course, you could be correct & BMD could have sorted all of these out, but all the players EVERY SINGLE GAME just forget what to do.



I agree, but to replace those two adequately just ain't going to happen if you agree Thurston, Cronk etc etc are not available to us. Which leads to another consistent gripe. Is BMD only capable of getting his team to compete if he has SL's best ever captain & organiser & SL's best ever prop & England captain? Welcome to the real world Mr McDermott




I don't know - I do not know what the budget is for coach, or who is available. But as others have said, coaches generally have a shelf life.



I would turn that around & say BMD has put us at real risk of relegation



What?
Reporter: "So **** (insert player's name here), what are you all doing to try & get yourselves out of the current predicament?"
****: "Well Brian, not a lot really. BMD is just going through the motions & we couldn't give a flying ****"



Very nice, but YOU said that we should all get behind BMD & the team. So your part in this is a few strokes of the keyboard from far away in the forlorn hope that one or more of the team may read these pages.